I think 20MB is fine for 80% of the games we'll see. I think the remainders can fit into 40MB or 50MB.

Set the limit at infinite, and I think it takes away from part of the spirit. UDG has always been about what us, the standard code geek, can make and create, not what some ad hoc team from some major software firm can create with their company paid workstations, audio/visual software, and long lunchbreaks.

The limit, to me, doesn't just have to do with how much I have to download to play it, it keeps the focus on gameplay and not eye/ear candy to make up for gameplay...

The above sounds a LOT like the PS3 vs Wii debates. Top of the line system with supreme performance versus a souped up gamecube from a company known for innovation.

Personally, my votes will be biased towards the innovative and fun, which rarely needs more than 20 mb

The "spirit" of uDevGames is, and has always been, to encourage people to make Mac games. Not to discriminate arbitrarily against certain groups of people. Every new Mac game is a win, every arbitrary restriction reduces the number of new Mac games that may come out of it.

If a professional Mac game development house can make a fantastic 200MB game in 3 months, and is willing to open-source it, why the *heck* would we want to turn them down, even if it sweeps every prize category?

That's a pretty darn good argument. I still think a packaging/delivery/presentation category would be a good idea if there is no size restriction, to cover subtle issues surrounding it, but I have to say I'm now pretty convinced the size restriction is bogus for the most part.

Zwilnik Wrote:It also means the judges and public don't have to download a few gigs of games to view them all. Keeping each game compact means there's no bias where only some of the games got downloaded and properly viewed.

This is a big assumption. There will be bias based solely on genres.
There will be bias based solely on the leech factor where people
download every game and vote for none.
What is the voting incentive for the public? Absolutely none.

If you're going to judge based solely on the size limit your judgement is already in question.

FreakSoftware Wrote:The bigger your game, the fewer votes you may get. It's a penalty you pay anyway in terms of voting.

This is another assumption that is not backed up by real world examples as I
demonstrated in the macgamefiles top ten downloads.
Even our resident download-aphobe is willing to download
huge XBOX 360 games based solely on his perception of quality of the games prior to download.
Yet will not download above 50 meg Mac games...why?
Because there is a dirth of crap Mac games no matter what there size is.
Apple's game website still lists games you can't even buy or download just to make it look
like there are more quality games available than actually exist.

The three month dev rule and the start from scratch rule are limiting enough.
These lead to burn out, I've seen it contest after contest.
People pour their heart and soul into an almost great game, don't sleep, strain
their personal relationships, lose, and never return to Mac game development.

There is currently the IGF contest going on, with 371 entries.
371 new games for Windows with unlimited development and testing time.
371 polished games competing for tens of thousands of dollars and
recognition by millions of people, judged by industry titans.
Nobody has to open source, no size limits, no time limits.

Mac game developers have not set the standard for game development for three solid decades.
Maybe its time to put the importance of quality far above arbitrary rules as the highest priority.

I have not seen a single valid argument for the rule in this thread, or any thread arguing this
rule since I came to the site in 2002. Nobody can point to a successful result of this size limit.

geezusfreeek Wrote:I think such things would most naturally be called "polish."

I suppose so, but I was thinking more in terms of something that could specifically target just the delivery, and the technical issues relating to that. Like I mentioned earlier, it'd be nice to be able to vote down in a category because the developer used all tga files instead of pngs and jpgs, which had the side-effect of unnecessarily used up bandwidth and disk space. This could also cover silliness such as a bad location for prefs, like the user's home directory, instead of user/Library/Application Support/Game/. A technical category if you will, which is more specific than overall polish. To me, polish is what you see, but the technical category could cover the more subtle stuff which you may not see. My justification for such a category being that this community does primarily support the technical nature of game development.

Obviously the end-product is what we're really after here, and size and technical considerations should take a back seat, but I don't think they should be left *completely* out of the equation.

And then OTOH, those who are voting and have no knowledge of the technical stuff might ruin the technical category idea altogether. Hmm...

igame3d Wrote:I have not seen a single valid argument for the rule in this thread, or any thread arguing this rule since I came to the site in 2002.

If iDevGames hosts games, there's a very real and measurable detriment to having no size limit. Bandwidth isn't free. The entry fee can cover some of it, but unless it's proportional to the size of the entry, someone could enter a 2 GB game after only paying $10 and cost Carlos a lot of money. The entry fee and the size limit both doubled since 2004, which is sensible.